Bought a new Remington 700 SPS in 243 and wanting to load some 55Gr Nosler Ballistic Tips. On the Nosler Website they have 52.5Grs H414 as the fastest and most accurate. Has anyone tried this load and if so how did it do in Remington 700?

Bought a new Remington 700 SPS in 243 and wanting to load some 55Gr Nosler Ballistic Tips. On the Nosler Website they have 42.5Grs H414 as the fastest and most accurate. Has anyone tried this load and if so how did it do in Remington 700?

Well, I believe you've misquoted the load, one of the reasons I never post data on the internet. In any case, I've gotten high velocities with a similar load, but I've gotten much better accuracy with faster powders such as H4895, Varget, and IMR4064 when shooting the 55 and 58 bullets.

BTW, the loads Nosler marks with an asterisk are the most accurate for each powder, not necessarily the most accurate overall. In addition, I've found many of the "most accurate loads" listed by various manuals to be really hit-or-miss. No pun intended! My most accurate loads but rarely correspond to those listed.

I've gotten much better accuracy with faster powders such as H4895, Varget, and IMR4064 when shooting the 55 and 58 bullets..

The lighter bullets in a .243 will almost always shoot better with powders at the speedy end of the spectrum. I've had the best luck with BL-C2 with the 60gr Sierra HP's, the only flyweight's that shoot OK in my rifle.

I have also found that on the average, the most accurate load in a test gun, is pretty much irrelevant in my guns.

I tried several powders (including h414) 44.5 gr. of Varget is the best for my my old 243 win mod 670 (nosler 55gr)At 300yrds 3 shot groups on average 2 1/4'' not bad for a rifle as old as I am.The load is about 200fps slower than the max listed load for h414 in the nosler manual.I'm sure a coyote couldnn't tell the difference

I did mis quote the load, but what I am looking for is accuracy, have worked up one with H380 @ 49.0 Gr that looks pretty good. Will try any suggestions.

DKA,
I just got a new 243, but a friend has had one for a few years now, and he uses that exact same load, although with 58 gr Hornady V-max bullets. He uses the CCI 200 primer, although I think I'll start at 47 grains and try the CCI 250 primer. His load is deadly accurate in his Rem 700 SPS, which is the same rifle I just got into my hands. Oddly, I looked in the Hornady and Speer manuals I have, and H380 isn't even listed. He got the load from the Hodgdon manual.

There is almost always a conflict between two accuracy considerations and primer choice: One is adequate ignition and the other is minimizing primer influence on shot-to-shot pressure consistency. Ball powders and very slow stick powders are hard to get burning, as Ole1830 noted. Magnum primers, on the other hand, have the most uncontrolled influence on pressure, since you don't get to weigh the priming mix or level the mix before it hardens or control the exact anvil positioning.

Benchrest shooters prefer mild primers to limit uncontrolled primer influence. Even with ball powder they will take two other steps to get good ignition before considering a hotter primer. First, they uniform their primer pockets and deburr their flashhole. Second, they pick a powder charge that fills the case pretty completely to ensure powder position over the flashhole is constant and the powder can't be blown out of the way of the flashhole by the primer gas.

In the mid-90's I experimented with using AA2520 in the .308 in my match M1A. After tuning a load with the 168 grain SMK, I found the best it would do was about 1.25" at 100 yards. I had got more like 0.9" with IMR 4895 and Scott 3032 (a no longer available powder that was so named because it was just slightly slower than IMR 3031). So, I knew the gun could do better. I was using Federal benchrest primers, and the best accuracy charge of 2520 did not fill the case as well a I might have liked. I had tried deburring flashholes to improve the 4895 and 3032 loads before, but it made no difference with the stick powders that I could see in that gun. However, I decided to try it with the 2520. Sandbagged groups dropped from 1.25" to 0.75" right away. So, for ball powder I always suggest trying flashhole deburring before going to magnum primers. Try both or a combination of the two to find what works best in your gun, but you may find the benchrest shooters are on to something with getting powder lit.

"First contemplation of the problems of Interior Ballistics gives the impression that they should yield rather easily to relatively simple methods of analysis. Further study shows the subject to be of almost unbelievable complexity." Homer Powley

Flashholes are formed by a punch from the primer pocket side when commercial cases are made, and with a drill from that same location in military cases. Both leave raised burrs on the inside that can make the primer flame spread unevenly. The flashhole tool cuts them away and chamfers the inside of the flashhole to boot, helping uniform the flame spread. The burrs (thank goodness) don't grow back, despite all the brass stretching and whatnot that goes on at 50,000 PSI, so it is a one-time operation for each case.

Incidentally, if you ever have some cash to burn on brass, Lapua and Norma cases rarely have any burr to remove. They are almost in benchrest condition as they come from the factory. They usually don't need neck turning, either, they are so evenly made. I can't make out, looking down through the casemouth, whether they run a second punch down in to flatten them or if they just use some sort of close-fitting anvil on the inside that forces the hole to form evenly? Whatever it is, they do it right.

"First contemplation of the problems of Interior Ballistics gives the impression that they should yield rather easily to relatively simple methods of analysis. Further study shows the subject to be of almost unbelievable complexity." Homer Powley

Shawn , Flashhole deburring is a one time deal. My best .243 load with 55gn noslers is 44gns of 4064 cci primers. This was shot from a remington 700. This is a devastating load on armadillos and coyotes. Q

Incidentally, if you ever have some cash to burn on brass, Lapua and Norma cases rarely have any burr to remove. They are almost in benchrest condition as they come from the factory. They usually don't need neck turning, either, they are so evenly made. I can't make out, looking down through the casemouth, whether they run a second punch down in to flatten them or if they just use some sort of close-fitting anvil on the inside that forces the hole to form evenly? Whatever it is, they do it right.

You know, I was brass shopping on Midway last night, and everything is out-of-stock in the 243 Win, EXCEPT Lapua, Norma, and Nosler - all the expensive stuff! Expensive, but sounds like maybe worth it.

I have to make a run to Twin Falls tomorrow, so I'll see if Sportmen's has any brass, and a Weaver mount, and some H380, and....

Q, I was torn between starting with the 55 grainers, or 58 grainers. I'm going to start with the 58's only because they work really well for my friend.

I've never tried the Nosler. It should have all the prep done for you, but I don't know how good the cases they start with are? None of the American makers seem to have applied precision to case manufacturing the way the Europeans have, so I would like to buy and gage a little of that stuff some time to see if it might be European or is selected from domestic brass? I know Norma does custom headstamp brass manufacturing.

Lapua consistently gets the highest marks from the benchrest guys for .308, but the Norma 6.5-284 I have is equally tight dimensionally. I use the NECO gage tool. That lets me see runout in case thickness not only at the neck but way back where the pressure ring forms, at the corner where the web of the case wall comes off the thick brass of the head. In the many pieces of bulk Winchester .308 I've measured, that area has always had about twice the thickness variance the neck does. Up to 0.0080" TIR in one piece of the last 500 I sorted, with about 0.0040" TIR being the average for the worst quintile (20%). That variance leads to what Merrill Martin referred to as a "banana shaped" case, since the sides don't stretch and recover equally from pressure. He could measure the resulting inaccuracy, which, IIRC, he put to the asymmetrical bolt thrust that results.

Of that 500 new Winchesters, most seemed to be in the 0.0025" TIR range at the pressure ring-to-be. Only the bottom quintile made my cut for match shooting, which I put at 0.0010" TIR. 16 of them did 0.0005" or better and were set aside for load accuracy determination. The 700 pieces of Norma brass I have in 6.5-284, however, all are 0.0010" or better. No exceptions. The smaller quantities of .308 and .30-06 Lapua brass I have are similarly tight on thickness.

The other variable is brass weight, which affects case capacity. The 500 Winchester cases were anywhere from 154.5 grains to 159.5 grains, and extreme spread of 5 grains. My Lapua .308 has an extreme spread of 2.9 grains. 70:30 brass (copper:zinc ration; aka, cartridge brass) has a nominal density of 8.53 gm/cc, so even though these numbers seem large, 3.2% for Winchester and 1.7% for Lapua, the actual powder capacity differences equal only 0.57 grains of water volume for Winchester and 0.34 grains for Lapua. To give you a sense of the significance, in QuickLOAD, using loads (I arbitrarily picked 52,000 PSI that a match load of mine generates) of 748, Varget, and H380 under the Sierra 175 grain MatchKing, the Winchester case weight difference amounted to 1100 PSI difference and 11 fps difference in muzzle velocity from a 24" tube. The Lapua variance amounted to about 700 PSI difference in pressure and about 7 fps difference in velocity from a 24" barrel. This is about the same you would get from a 0.33 grain (±0.165 grain) powder variance in the Winchester and 0.19 grain (±0.085 grain) in the Lapua.

That variance is nothing powder measures aren't already giving up in consistency. However, if you are using a measure that throws a stick powder ±0.3 grains, as some do, and you get one of your lightest charges in one of the lightest Winchester cases or your heaviest charge in the heaviest Winchester case, the combined effect is the equivalent to 0.9 grains of powder difference in two identical cases. Too much for best accuracy based on barrel timing difference. It's not going to be an issue if you weigh every charge, but if you don't you'll want to separate the cases into narrower weight bands.

The other reason for weighing cases is to improve consistency by sorting what tooling the cases came from? Each set of tooling is more consistent than the lot is as a whole. My Winchester case batch a histogram revealed at least 4 different sets of forming dies were used to make the lot based on the number of distribution peaks that appeared. Almost all the runout passing match cases came from just one of these four distributions, which were on the lighter end of the total weight distribution, indicating new, unworn forming dies. Unfortunately the four distributions overlapped enough to make both weighing and gaging necessary to complete the sorting. Winchester should get in touch with the W. Edwards Deming Institute.

Lapua makes it easier. Below is a histogram of 30 weights of randomly sampled cases. You can clearly see two distinct distributions, so it is pretty apparent two sets of tooling were used to manufacture the lot. I was then able to sort all of them into two batches from two different sets of tools, and stop thinking about case variance at all.

"First contemplation of the problems of Interior Ballistics gives the impression that they should yield rather easily to relatively simple methods of analysis. Further study shows the subject to be of almost unbelievable complexity." Homer Powley

Boy Nick, you must do some serious target shooting to go thru what you do. I had to take a hike to clear my head after reading your post. But seriously, interesting stuff, and it's apparent you've been trained in, and use, statistics.

I picked up 100 pieces of Winchester brass at Sportmen's today. It was kind of like when Henry Ford started making cars.....any color you want, as long as it's black. Not sure of the brass my friend uses in his 243, but I suspect Remington, and he consistently gets 1/2" groups from his load/rifle and I don't believe he cleans up the flashhole. I suspect that I couldn't make full use of the higher quality (and more $$) brass as I just don't spend that much time shooting targets and honing my shooting skills. I do think I'll do a test on the brass when I settle on a load, with and without deburred flashholes.

It doesn't seem that Midway is the only place with shortages of selections of shooting components, as I wanted to pick up a pound of H380, and all I had a choice for was an 8 lb keg, so that's what I came home with. If it doesn't work out, I'm sure my friend can use it.

Flashholes are formed by a punch from the primer pocket side when commercial cases are made, and with a drill from that same location in military cases.......... Norma cases rarely have any burr to remove. They are almost in benchrest condition as they come from the factory....... they run a second punch down in to flatten them or if they just use some sort of close-fitting anvil on the inside that forces the hole to form evenly? Whatever it is, they do it right.

I believe that Norma drills their flash holes also. Not sure what they do from the inside. Don't use any Norma cases now, but would dearly love to try some out in .308 Norma Magnum. Really the only magnum that I've ever coveted, and in a .30-06 length action to boot. Oh well, maybe someday.

You may be right on the Norma flashholes. Drilling leaves less metal displaced to clean up. Lapua may do the same. The military always specified it that I can recall, so this must have been an issue going back to between the WW's, at least. The funny thing is, if you look at a handful of Lake City cases, you notice a lot of them where the drill has walked significantly off center. Never see that in Norma or Lapua, which may just be an artifact of the tool design. A stepped drill bushing that actually enters the primer pocket would ensure centering. Lake City must not do that. Going from the inside would be pretty awkward because of the length and the width changing with every chambering, while, from the outside, you have only two primer pocket sizes to deal with.

Shawn,

You just get bit by the bug and turn into an accuracy crank. I was speaking with a young lady on Thursday who was last year's Women's National Collegiate Pistol champion. Her father got her into competing and does all her reloading. She reported that last year at Camp Perry, she learned that while she was at school, he had been taking all .22 rounds she was to fire in competition and dropping them individually into her gun's chamber to check the fit. He culls anything that feels even remotely different, then boxes the passing rounds back up for her. Seems like little league. The parents are the ones who become fanatical.

Statistics are very useful in shooting because one problem can mask another and they get tricky to isolate. I was always taught the biggest obstacle to accurate shooting is between the ears, and that is true at a number of levels. However, when I started messing with radial statistics on group size, I also found a surprising (to me) number of people claimed their guns "shoot better than I do" and were wrong. Their worst errors (flinching, yanking the trigger, etcetera) were, in fact, worse than the gun shot, but when they were doing their best, especially from prone position, the gun could be their limiting factor. As a result, I rebarreled and accurized some of the Garands our rifle club owned, and a number of the beginners using club guns found their scores went up 40 points out of 800 possible. For those beginners shooting 60% to 75% of possible, that was a lot of encouragement.

My point is, the accuracy steps you can take don't just matter to the high master class shooters. You need to take them just to find out how well you are actually shooting? Except for new kids who are completely off the paper, it is almost never safe to assume one source of error is so overarching that no others matter. You have to prove it.

As to flashhole deburring, I'll mention again that I've not been able to detect a real difference in stick powder with a match rifle. Just ball powder, and that was with one that did not fill the case really well, as your H380 should. Some accuracy sweet spots are more sensitive than others, and you will find this is the kind of step that matters much more to the touchy ones, of course. In any event, nothing on the planet is compelling you to use it or to forgo it. A deburring tool is not expensive, so you might want to start by using something like Dan Newberry's round robin method to find an optimum charge weight load with the H380. These usually span weight variation of at least 0.6 grains (though I once found one in .308 that spanned 2.5 grains in my M1A; the no-longer made Scott powder, of course). Once you have one, then rerun the exercise with magnum primers to learn the difference that makes (this can shift the charge weight range down a little). Then deburr the flashholes and go back and fire again with your original recipe. See if, in the middle of the range, you don't find the group tightening up a bit? Fire the deburred cases again with magnum primers in their best powder range. See what combination is best? Deburring flashholes is one of those steps that may or may not help, but certainly won't hurt anything.

By the way, I would take your 100 cases and see if I couldn't sort out some matching brass to do the above exercise with? Look for a light side weight peak. You can make a weight histogram from the brass itself by taking a sheet of paper and marking a line along the bottom with the weight range in tenths of a grain. Then line cases of the same weight up above its number. Each line of cases is then serves as a bar on the histogram. You'll see the tooling groupings.

It is also a good idea to run the new brass through a sizing die and to trim it to the same length before weighing it. Also, neck sizing-only will help compensate for brass shortcomings during load development. It will increase your brass life. Another trick is to use a very light bullet and load of pistol powder the first time you fire new brass and before your first trimming and weighing. A 55 grain bullet and, say, 7 or 8 grains of Unique. What this does is fireform the case to your chamber at a pressure too low to stick the brass to the chamber during its expansion. As a result, it will fill the chamber but by actually backing up the case to the breech, expanding the shoulder from the neck. This sizes the case to your chamber without forming a pressure ring of stretched brass at the head. It shortens the neck slightly, which is why you don't trim first. The advantage is you then start full load development with brass custom shaped to fit your chamber and that has no pressure ring stretched thin near the casehead. Thus, future head separation is delayed, and if you always neck size-only, it will never be the cause of losing a case. Even if you full-length resize, you only need to push the shoulder back about 0.002" for good feeding. That is all the SAMMI maximum case dimension entering a SAMMI minimum chamber dimension has by way of clearance. This will reduce pressure ring thinning greatly and keep the cases usable much longer, as long as you practice good neck annealing every fifth loading or so.

"First contemplation of the problems of Interior Ballistics gives the impression that they should yield rather easily to relatively simple methods of analysis. Further study shows the subject to be of almost unbelievable complexity." Homer Powley

Awhile back, I got some A-Square 416 Taylor brass and the flashhole was so tight that it was pulling the decapping pin out of the die. So, I've got a flashhole tool, and I will be using it for my 243 tests.

I'll read through the round robin link - thx.

BTW, I've read many methods for barrel break-in, and whether it's even worth the effort. I think I'll do it, and the method I plan to use is: Shoot 1 shot, clean; shoot two shots, clean; shoot 3 shots, clean, etc, etc. Seems there's a practical limit to how far this should be taken, but once into the double-digit firings between cleanings, can get "double duty" from the exercise to start getting accuracy indications.